Crystalline TiO2 supported on stainless steel mesh deposited in a one step process via pulsed DC magnetron sputtering for wastewater treatment applications

Magnetron co-sputtered Bi12TiO20/Bi4Ti3O12 composite – An efficient photocatalytic material with photoinduced oxygen vacancies for water treatment application

“…BT thin films were deposited using a Nordiko sputtering rig (schematic given in supplementary material (S1)), described in detail in an earlier work [29]. In brief, deposition was performed from metallic bismuth (300 mm × 100 mm, 99.5% purity, bonded to a copper backing plate) and titanium (300 mm × 100 mm, 99.5% purity, directly cooled) targets fitted onto two Teer Coatings Ltd unbalanced type II magnetrons.…”

“…Different coating compositions were obtained by varying the power applied to the Ti target from 0.5 to 1.5 kW with 0.25 kW increments, whilst keeping the power applied to the Bi fixed at 0.2 kW. TiO2 samples were also deposited in an argon/oxygen reactive atmosphere, with 1 kW applied to the Ti target, without rotation for 1 hour (conditions were established in an earlier study for production of photocatalytically active titanium dioxide films) [29]. All depositions were operated with a pulse frequency of 100 kHz, a duty cycle of 60 %, while all samples were annealed in air at 600 °C post-deposition.…”

“…It is clear that there are some morphological differences between these two materials. TiO2 has a homogeneous cauliflower-like structure, typical for thin film grown by magnetron sputtering [29], while the BT750 sample developed a rather heterogeneous structure, composed of angular crystallites, randomly distributed and embedded in a smooth matrix. Further studies of surface morphology were performed by AFM (results for TiO2 and BT750 are shown in Figure 3 (c, d), respectively).…”

Visible light photocatalytic bismuth oxide coatings are effective at suppressing aquatic cyanobacteria and degrading free-floating genomic DNA

“…Investigation on reactive species generated on the surface of photocatalytic bismuth oxide under visible light irradiation was carried out using scavenger experiments in a manner similar to earlier published work (Grao et al, 2020). The following scavengers were used: isopropanol (IPA) for •OH, 4-hydroxy-TEMPO (TMP) for O2 •-, sodium oxalate (SO) for h + and sodium nitrate (SN) for e -(all chemicals used were of analytical purity and purchased from Sigma Aldrich, UK, unless stated otherwise).…”

“…Since some of the scavengers themselves (e.g. IPA) may have detrimental effects on living media growth, the scavenging experiments were carried out using the model pollutant dye Rhodamine B (RhB), which is frequently used for evaluation of the photocatalytic activity of materials (Ratova et al, 2018, Grao et al, 2020. The dye degradation experiment has been described in detail in earlier work (Ratova et al, 2018); in brief, the RhB absorbance peak height at 554 nm was monitored in real time using an Ocean Optics USB4000 spectrometer.…”